From February 2007 through December 2011, two Colby College graduates, one a Yankees fan and one a Red Sox fan provided unsolicited rants, second-guessing, insight, and commentary on the Yankees, Red Sox, and all things baseball.
57 months, 1,645 posts, 12,680 comments - Thanks for the memories.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Tampa Massacre

First of all, happy birthday to upside upside potential prospect rookie young potential upside outfielder 46, who is now 28 years old. Not even I can deny that he's had a great season, and here I can say I was wrong (to be balanced next paragraph). But this is the prime of his career. Let's stop pretending he's young. Nice catch last night.

Let's go back to the last paragraph I wrote: But the bottom line is, the Red Sox have Tampa right where they want them. This weekend, they won't (they'll probably get swept, making it a 3.5-game lead which seems to always happen around this time of the year - the second-place wild card team never dies), but they should win the series. Time to step on Tampa's throats.

I was pretty darn right about them getting swept, huh? The genius Twitter account SoreGloveHand started hash-tagging "Tampa Massacre" on Friday morning as well, whoever that is. Time to get the bus rolling.

1. Darnell McDonald: Congratulations. You are now only arguably the worst offensive player in major league baseball, having raised your batting average above the Mendoza Line. Since you bottomed out at .109 in late June (late June!), you've hit a blazing .250 and are now hitting .203. But you should know that 46 is fast, can cover a lot of ground, and is more afraid of crashing into someone than most people are of Ray Lewis and his dawgs in a nightclub. Get the F out of his way and let him make his own bed.
2. John Lackey: The Boston Globe said you were arguably the worst starting pitcher in baseball (phrasing intentional for the sake of repetition). Not covering the base is inexusable. Getting lit up by a weak-hitting catcher in John Jaso is inexusable. But at least this weekend you admitted you sucked.
3. Jon Lester: When you needed to be a stopper more than any other time, you reverted to 2006 form. Well, at least he's still four months younger than 46.
4. Kyle Weiland: Matsuzaka is not the best guy to emulate. Over the plate, please.
5. Carl Crawford: It's called a cutoff man.
6. Josh Reddick: It's called a cutoff man.
7. Dustin Pedroia: Not a good time to become bad. You still have a three and a half game lead in the wild card - yay!
8. Adrian Gonzalez: Not a good time to become average. Please ignore the people talking about 46's higher home run totals and go back to being you.
9. Daniel Bard: Not a good time to be like the rest of the bullpen.
10. Mike Aviles: All leading and base-stealing privileges are hereby revoked. Please stand with both feet on the base until the ball is put in play.
11. Matt Albers: Holy crap, are you a middle reliever or what? You're Manny Delcarmen minus being from Roxbury!
12. Michael Bowden: I kinda feel bad for you. What happened to your upside? Your power, your good stuff? You're like the girl everyone wanted to take to junior prom because you had great boobs, then gained a lot of weight in college and showed up to the ten-year reunion having lost a one-sided battle against gravity. What happened?
13. Josh Beckett: We'll talk to you later on this week.
14. JD Drew: Thanks for being such a warrior. Hope your impinged shoulder and sore finger are doing great, and hope your hunting gear is ready to go on September 29th, when the Red Sox are doing playing baseball for the year.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

DV

When the Sox are good they are the best team in baseball. When they are bad, they cannot beat anyone. And there is no in between with them. This sounds lame in hindsight, but I expected the Sox to get swept. They haven't played well in three weeks. They have only one pitcher right now that you can have any confidence in at all (and he was horrible yesterday) and when the bats go quiet, they go silent.

Yesterday's start is why I say what I say about Jon Lester. A true ace or number one guy gives you seven innings and one or two runs. He lasted four innings. And it was easily the biggest start of the year for him. He couldn't have come up more lame. He is who he is--a good starter who fills that number 2/3 slot very well. But he is not an ace and at this point I doubt he ever will be.

The good news--the Sox are coming home. The bad news? Tim Wakefield and John Lackey are starting the next two nights. And they are both horrible.

If you talk about "coming up lame," look no further to the purported "ace" of the staff - literally. We'll dig into him later, probably tomorrow. As I am now unabashedly a one-dimensional sports fan, I will blog about baseball during the football game. I am higher on Lester than you are. He's a second-tier ace. He's not a Halladay, CC, or Felix, but he's the next step down - better than most "aces."

Too much Bigelow Green Tea for Francona. Let's replace it with a Four Loko so he can get amped up and start destroying property in the visitor's clubhouse. Sorry - these spoiled millionaires need a firecracker lit.

You should have predicted the sweep like I did on Friday. The magic of the Internet means that you have an audit trail of all bold predictions. In the interest of historical accuracy, our misspelling of the tag "Francisco Cervelli" remains. Your prediction in the comments section would have lived forever.

I think we can refer to Lester as a National League Ace. That is, if you put him in the National League West, on say the Padres, he'd put up 17 wins a year and sub 3 ERA and everyone would call him an ace.

He's not an Ace in the American League East that's for sure.

But moving beyond that, I think question everyone really has today is, can the Oakland Raiders understand this evening what it really means to go into a hostile road environment and take something away on Monday night?

Honestly, the Broncos are not very good and the Raiders should probably win. Having said that, I have a feeling that Orton will hook up with Brandon Lloyd for 400 yards passing and 3 touchdowns and the Broncos will win. Fortunately, I have hedged against that possiblity by having Lloyd on my fantasy team. It's a win/win.

Can't believe I'm saying it, but I did not miss fantasy sports really at all this year. I've been sans fantasy football for several years now, and it's the first year in the last decade where I haven't done fantasy baseball. I don't miss it really at all. My fantasy football team was 14-2 last year but, unfortunately, they got blown out by the Jets in the playoffs.